Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has selected the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU as the latest addition to its networking stack, offering OCI customers a powerful new option for offloading data center tasks from CPUs.

OCI offers a wide range of cloud infrastructure and platform services to its customers to build and run applications and services in the cloud or on premises. By utilizing BlueField-3, OCI is extending its long-established approach of offloading data center infrastructure tasks from CPUs.

BlueField-3 is the foundation of the data center control plane that delivers cloud and AI services. Tests show power reductions of up to 24% on servers using NVIDIA BlueField DPUs compared to servers without DPUs.

The DPUs support Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity at up to 400 gigabits per second and provide 4x more compute power, up to 4x faster crypto acceleration, 2x faster storage processing and 4x more memory bandwidth compared to the previous generation of BlueField.

BlueField also delivers full backward-compatibility through the NVIDIA DOCA software framework. DOCA equips developers with advanced, zero-trust security capabilities, including the ability to create metered cloud services that control resource access, validate each application and user, isolate potentially compromised machines and help protect data from breaches and theft.